The South at Work: Observations from 1904

Rehabilitation Is Now Almost Complete

Rehabilitation Is Now Almost Complete The Future of the South Is Secure and Is in the Hands of Its White People—Its Sufferings by the War in Contrast with Its Rapid Growth in the Decade 1850–60—The Incomparable Chance It Offers the Industrious Ambitious Man [Special Correspondence of the Transcript] St. Louis, May 28. Whatever else the thousands who will visit St.Louis this summer may decide concerning the city and the Fair, they can hardly deny that the place is sufficiently central to encourage breadth and catholicity in one’s views of American life.1 Foreigners will have a good chance to compare the contributions of their various countries to our population and to our civilization. Americans from different sections will be wholesomely uncertain whether the place owes its more distinctive characteristics to the North or the South, the East or the West. Coming up from Northern Texas, through the Ozark mountains, I was skirting another of the edges of the South.Arkansas,of course,is pronouncedly Southern. The Indian Territory and Oklahoma seem to most of us Western. Published in the Boston Evening Transcript, June 1, 1904. 128 Rehabilitation Is Now Almost Complete But in them both the proportion of Southerners is very large. Even Texas has contributed nearly forty thousand to the population of Oklahoma and nearly seventy thousand to that of the Territory. In the Territory, moreover, most of the tribes are Southern, and several of them formerly maintained the institution of slavery.2 Looking back again, not merely over the region I have traversed, but over the whole course of my own elucubrations, my fear is that the Negro occupies too much of the foreground. “The problem” has no doubt exercised over me the fascination it always has for one who visits or studies the South. It is, however, my desire to point out that the Negro as a factor in Southern civilization is on the whole of less importance relatively to other factors than he ever was before. It is not my belief that because of his presence in the South it is any longer impossible there to maintain a good standard of industrial effectiveness. If that were so, it would be of little use to dwell on the natural sources of wealth. Cuba is an object lesson sufficiently close at hand, to show how much more important than any natural resources a land possesses are the sense, the industry, and the thrift of the people who inhabit it. Let me, therefore , in this last letter, emphasize what may be too easily forgotten—that the affairs of the South are under the resolute, imperious control of white men; of men who are incomparably devoted to their race and indefatigably minded to maintain its standards. It is well to remember what they accomplished while their dependence on the African was far greater than it is today. Unless the figures lie, there is scarcely another chapter in our whole industrial history so remarkable as the gains which the South made in the ten years from 1850 to 1860. Its farm values more than doubled. In the building of railroads, it actually outstripped the New England and the Middle States together,though at the beginning of the decade it was in this respect far behind. Either at this time or somewhat earlier, a start was made in the manufacture of iron and of cotton, and in the development of many other resources. It is hardly too much to say, in fact, that save for the discovery of unsuspected opportunities, such as the fitness of the western gulf coast for rice-growing, and the invention of new appliances and methods,nothing of the first importance has been done since 1880,which was not at least planned before 1860. It is true that the abundance of fresh land and the ease and quick returns of growing cotton, a form of agriculture to which slave labor was thought to be peculiarly well adapted, for a time put a sort of premium on wasteful planting, so that all other industries suffered a comparative neglect. But for slave-owners in a new country, where living was easy, the Southerners showed very little sluggishness in the pursuit of wealth. Rehabilitation Is Now Almost Complete 129 The figures showing how much wealth they had acquired up to 1860, and how their possessions then compared with those of other sections, are to...